Into the Night

Erik and his post about church camps just brought up an old ghost from my past. This one's going to end with kind of a downer however, so I appologize in advance.

It was probably either the summer that I was 12 or 13, so I was just out of 7th grade, let's say. I was Lutheran then and I went to church camp for one week every summer, right after school let out. There were kids from various Lutheran churches all around the Albany area who attended that particular week.

The camp was named Camp Medusa and it was in the Catskills, just below Albany. It was a crappy little place with no hot water in the bathrooms, and log cabins where we froze our butts off because the mountains get cold at night even in the summer.The "lake" could fit 2 or 3 times over on your average football field and I didn't really go into it much because I couldn't swim.

(Oh, now THERE's a story, 'How I almost drowned in the Bahamas spring break of my senior year in a cockroach ridden motel because some stupid kid pushed me in the pool as a jok and the real joke was that I couldn't swim")

Anyway, there was this one guy. His name was Jimmy. He was just amazing to me. Really tall, probably almost 6 feet tall even though he was about 14 or 15. Blonde hair and blue eyes you could absolutely swim in. He was a completely adorable guy and a total flirt and would walk around singing. There was a song that was very popular at the time, and the chorus included "why dont' we steal away, into the night?" He sang that song walking from the cabins to the main hall, from the main hall to the "lake".... everywhere he went he would sing that song because he knew the girls loved it.

Not that he noticed me, of course. I was younger, and rather plain - glasses, long brown hair, and dorky clothes, and there were prettier girls his own age. It's probably good that he didn't notice me, because I would have been putty in his hands. I had a complete and total crush on him, from afar.

About a month after we went to camp my friend Karen called me and told me that Jimmy had stabbed his younger sister and killed her.

I never met the sister, but of course I was horrified. I was terrified by the thought that he had been arrested, and heartbroken to know that he was in jail and his life was basically over. Since I was 12, and there was no internet (not in my house anyway and besides this was about '77) I never heard another word about him. Karen never did either - he wasn't really a part of our own church, and so we had no ties to anyone in his community who knew anything about it. I knew I would never see him again.

Was he drunk at the time? Stoned? Insane? Don't know. I don't know if he went to jail - I don't know if he's out (on some sort of defense plea, or if he served whatever time he was sentenced... )you know?? But all of these years later, it still makes me sad, to think that in one moment, he could go from this absolutely wonderful person to someone who had killed his own sister. I wouldn't want to think about what he might be like now, all of these years later. I would rather think of him as he was, at camp.

The other day I was shopping and I heard the song he walked around singing at camp. Isn't it amazing how an old song can make you think of a very specific peson, dredging up a memory you hadn't touched in decades?


Why don't we steal away... into the night?